Barry Needham -- Early into the Fight

What had gone wrong? Why didn't the air force call?
Through the spring and summer of 1940, these thoughts preoccupied young Barry
Needham.

He'd gone to the RCAF's recruiting office in
Regina the previous January, accepted an officer's advice to quit smoking and
gain some weight, endured a medical examination -- and passed.

And then no
call.

Frustrated, he went back again, taking his father,
who pressed recruiters to search their records until they found the reason.
Barry's medical classification, A1B, had been inadvertently misfiled as
"ATB", meaning "not fit for immediate service".

"I’ve often wondered ... if I'd just kept
quiet, maybe I'd have been able to sit out the war!" he quipped to the
January 2001 meeting of the Roland Groome chapter of the Canadian Aviation
Historical Society in Regina. "But think of the fun I would have missed!"

Thus it came to pass that Barry was inducted into
the RCAF on Sept. 30, 1940, along with his friend Rod Smith.

Barry was sent to the RCAF manning depot at
Brandon, Man.., then was posted to guard duty at the new RCAF station at Prince
Rupert, B.C., which was being built because "there was some concern that
the Japanese were going to invade the west coast ... they sent us there to stop
'em!" (Coastal Prince Rupert was noteworthy for two distinctions, he added: it
rained on an average of 300 days each year and contained what was then believed to
be the only legal red-light district in North America.) Weatherwise, "our
salvation was that it's mostly rock, so you're not in the mud all the time. The
first [clothing] issue we got was rubber boots, sou'westers and Ross Rifles
left over from World War One!"

Release from this duty in December, 1940 brought a
train trip across the northern Rockies via Jasper, where the townspeople
thoughtfully took the small unit of airmen into their homes. "Some of them
even cooked our Christmas dinner a little early," he recalled. "And
that afternoon, we played a little hockey game against the local team. I forget
who won, but it was a great place. I'll always remember that."

___

Barry's next stop was the RCAF's No. 2 Initial
Training School in Regina's Normal School (teachers’ college), where selections
were made for aircrew trades. "How and why they decided I don't
know," said Barry, who was posted as a pilot trainee on Feb. 1, 1941 to 15
Elementary Flying Training School at the nearby Regina airport, where he made
his first flight (in a Tiger Moth). After 6 hours, 35 minutes of instruction,
he went solo on Feb. 15. "I don't recall a great deal about it except that
I was probably scared to death."

After graduation, he was sent to 11 Service Flying
Training School (11 SFTS) at Yorkton, where he was part of the new school's
first class. He logged 77 hours of dual time on Harvards and 73 solo. He
graduated June 30 as a sergeant pilot. "And with a total of 150
hours, they sent us overseas," he said. "I imagine that it was just a
year after the Battle of Britain and they were still short of fighter pilots."

He was posted to Halifax to await transport
overseas and, with another young pilot named A.P.L. "Apple" Smith, he
played a hunch and volunteered for an unspecified assignment. Instead of
heading to Britain with his friends from Yorkton, "first thing we knew, we
were on a train on the way back to Montreal." They were taken to the
waterfront, and then to a rather small ship. "I thought, 'This is the one
that's going to take us out to the big ship!"

Instead, it was the ship that was to take them
across the wartime Atlantic: a 3,000-ton Norwegian freighter, the captain of
which joked that it was so tiny that "the Germans would never waste a
torpedo on us ... that's how small we were!"

With the captain's blessing, a handful of airmen
"did the town" and crawled back on board in time for sailing. Barry
celebrated his 21st birthday aboard the little ship.

A couple of days at the aircrew reception centre at
Bournemouth were followed by a posting to an operational training unit (OTU)
at Heston, near London, adding 33 hours, 50 minutes to his logbook in the
Spitfire II fighter. He and Smith were posted in September, 1941, to the RCAF's
412 Squadron, which had been formed the previous June at RAF Digby. The
squadron's CO was "Chuck" Trevena, a prewar RCAF reservist from
Regina (where he had worked in The Leader-Post’s accounting department) who also had
fought with the RCAF’s No. 1 Squadron in the Battle of Britain.

Another pilot who joined 412 Squadron around that
time was P/O John Gillespie Magee, a young, American-born fighter pilot-writer
whose literary output included a poem called "High Flight" that has
become a classic. He was an officer, Barry a sergeant pilot; they had little
chance to talk. And on Dec. 11, 1941, 412 Squadron and three others were
practising operations above the cloud. The CO of 412 Squadron spotted a hole in
the clouds, put his squadron into a line-astern formation and led it down
through it the hole. Alas, Magee’s Spitfire collided with an Oxford training
aircraft. “He bailed out, but he was too low and the 'chute never opened, Barry said."

(An aside: a member of Britain’s Severnside
Aviation Society named Ivan Hansen, has been trying to assemble an anthology of
Magee's other writings. "Magee's family has given him plenty of material
that nobody else has ever seen," Barry said. This includes 50 poems, 21
essays, two short stories, two sketches, two plays and a poem entitled Brave
New World, which had won a 1939 poetry award.)

___

The daily work of 412 Squadron in late 1941 and
early '42 included convoy patrols off the British coast and "sometimes,
we'd go to Manston or West Malling and do sweeps over northern France." A variation of the latter was a "rhubarb", in which a small number of
RAF fighters would “fly low over the Channel (to avoid the radar) and then
climb like crazy and come down again". He added: "the deal was to
shoot up everything that looked like it was part of the German war
effort."

October 1941 saw the squadron re-equipped with the
new Spitfire Mark V, which had two 20mm cannon and four .303 machine guns in
place of eight small .303s in earlier Spitfires. It also moved to Wellingore, a grass airfield in Lincolnshire. CO Chuck Trevena (a former Reginan)
was replaced the next month by Christopher "Kit" Bushell, a senior
flight commander and graduate of Royal Military College who hailed from Qu'Appelle. "A very fine
pilot, an exceptional officer and a natural leader," remembered Barry.

Tragically, Bushell was killed within mere days.
The new CO was S/L John D. “Jack” Morrison, who had previously been with 401
Squadron. On a sweep to Abbeville the next spring, he, too, would be shot down
and killed.

There was also practice in flying formation and
scrambles. On patrol, Barry once spotted two Dornier bombers, but never got
close enough to open fire.

Feb. 12, 1942, was a particularly eventful day. In
poor weather, the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisnau made a successful daylight
dash through the English Channel to a port in the Netherlands, stunning the British
military establishment. "The weather was so bad that we had difficulty
even finding the Scharnhorst -- and those that did got beat up pretty
badly."

Around that time, Barry was part of a rhubarb that
was bounced by "a swarm" of Me 109s. As per instructions, he broke
sharply "and went around and around ... when I straightened out, there
wasn't another plane around for miles and miles."

March 15, 1942 was another memorable day: the first
time he and a number of his buddies had a chance to fire their guns in anger.
They had been scrambled to search for reported German E-boats (torpedo boats or
gunboats) and indeed some small craft were spotted. But were they German -- or
very similar British MTBs?

F/O Bill Napier offered to take a good look, buzzing
the ships -- and drawing plenty of flak for his trouble. "He said, 'They
can't be very friendly!' and we took turns shooting them up, going around about
three times. One sunk, four others lying dead in the water. The navy said that
we did such a good job that they sent us a commendation."

By April 27, the squadron was in southern England,
leaving behind Barry's buddy, “Apple" Smith. As he flew south later to
join 412, Smith's Spitfire began to “porpoise". Like Magee five months
earlier, he baled out, "but he was also too low for his chute to
open."

Luckier was another pilot, Claude Weaver, an
American who'd joined the RCAF. On a rhubarb over Belgium he became separated
from Barry and flew in broad daylight over Ostend harbour -- "about the
worst thing you could do because just about every flak gun in there opened
up." But Weaver survived, was posted to Malta, was shot down and became a
PoW, was freed and eventually went back on ops before being shot down and
killed.

The tempo of operations was heavy. Between June
4-18, 1942, Barry logged 15 flights. Most were convoy patrols -- "one of
them, I notice here," said Barry, consulting his logbook, "was so
close to the Belgian coast that we came under fire from the shore
batteries." On a sweep over Abbeville, the squadron lost a US Army Air
Force colonel named Clark. His presence takes some explaining: about a
half-dozen USAAF pilots had been attached to 412 Squadron to gain experience
flying Spitfires in combat. Such a senior officer would normally remain on the
ground, but the colonel, wanting to gain experience in the air, "went on
operations; he was shot down and became a PoW,” Barry said. “I've often
wondered what his pay packet would have been like when he got back."

August 1942, was "very busy", too, with
26 flights including three patrols over embattled Dieppe on the 22nd. The
Canadian Army took heavy casualties, as did the air force that day. The best
Barry managed was a shot at a 190. Another Saskatchewanian in the squadron,
Bill Aldcorn, bailed out over the Channel and was picked up by a British ship.
There exists a memorable photograph of a grinning Alcorn being pulled aboard.
"As he came over the side of the ship, you never saw a bigger smile on
anybody in your life. He'd been in the water and he was a non-swimmer."

Post-Dieppe, the squadron moved Tangmere, then to
Redhill and continued its fare of convoy patrols, bomber escorts and
interception of raiders -- for the Luftwaffe had started “their own rhubarbs”
-- a new series of bombing raids against Britain.

Barry remembers being at immediate readiness,
strapped into the cockpit of his Spitfire when he and a pilot named
"Pipsqueak" Powell were scrambled. Seeing explosions from bombs
dropped nearby, they chased a pair of 190s over the Channel. One 190 made the
mistake of turning, at which point Powell bagged him.

Barry kept after the other. "I kept pushing it
‘through the gate’, which you were only supposed to do in an emergency. I was
able to get close enough to him to get strikes on him, so I made a claim."

There is an interesting sidebar to this incident:
about a year ago, Barry got a letter from a British researcher who'd been
checking into German records of this era, found Barry's combat report and reported that the German 190 in Barry's sights was indeed damaged,
but landed safely. The German pilot's brother, "had a photograph and a
letter from the pilot describing this flight; how he'd lost his No. 2, how
they'd bombed the gas works and how, when he reached France, he was like a
sardine in a can of oil because I'd damaged the oil [system] somehow,"
Barry said. A photo of the German pilot and his buddies showed that "they
looked no different than we did, sitting under the wing of an airplane and
enjoying the sunshine. I often wondered [about him] because I'd put in a claim,
but I had never any confirmation that I'd done anything."

There was frequent bad weather in the autumn of
1942, but he was able to attack two trains in France ("I never thought
about it until much later: those were poor Frenchmen who were running those
trains") and did escorts for American B-17 and B-24 bombers on raids over
western Europe. Particularly chilling was seeing the occasional bomber crippled
and falling out of formation. "It was like watching a big, wounded bird
flip-flopping around the sky. Anybody who's a hunter will recognize that.
Sometimes, parachutes would come out."

Two more moves and bad weather intervened, but
action picked up again in March 1943, when he logged 22 operations. The same
month, he was promoted to flight lieutenant and became a flight commander.
Around the same time, the squadron moved from the front line in southeast
England to the RAF's 10 Group in Wales, where operations consisted largely of
patrols over coastal convoys. By the time he finished his first operational
tour that month, he had logged 250 operational hours and had a total of 518
hours flying as a single-engined pilot. Between mid-1941 and April 1943, 412
Squadron had moved no fewer than 14 times.

___

Barry's next posting was a "sentence" to
an OTU, where he checked out new pilots on the Spitfire. Some, ironically, were
former BCATP instructors with far more flying hours than he. After six months there,
he was posted home for 30 days leave, including Christmas 1943.

On Jan.2, 1944, he boarded the Queen Mary in New
York for the trip back to Britain. His companions were 8,000 black GIs who'd
just had their inoculations for overseas duty and were understandably queasy.
The weather was awful and almost everybody aboard became violently ill. Sewage
flowed inches deep and, at one point, nobody left their cabins save for a few
individuals sent to get sandwiches.

Safe in England, Barry initially was assigned to
401 Squadron at Biggin Hill, where ops included escorting USAAF bombers. On
March 16, he rejoined 412 Squadron as a flight commander. The other flight
commander was F/L George "Buzz" Beurling, by then a high-scoring ace
("too bad some of his expertise didn't rub off on me!" Barry quipped)
with a DSO, DFC, DFM and bar.

As Barry put it, “everything you've heard about
Beurling was true!"

For example, the ace didn't smoke or drink, but he
did energetically chase women. "On several occasion, I'd been in bed when
he'd come in, grab his sleeping bag and go ... he had a WAAF waiting on the
squash court!"

Beurling also had a macabre, blood-thirsty streak.
When, for example, a damaged B-17 or B-24 would make an emergency landing on
412’s field, "he'd be the first one down to see all the blood and gore. He
just lapped it up."

Gone were the doughty old Spitfire Mark Vs that had
been outmatched by the FW-190. Of the Mark V, he said, “I was never that
confident; I was scared most of the time. The ‘five’ was a good airplane, but
it was no match for the 190, that was for sure.”

In its place was the Mark 9 (“a match for the 190”),
which also “had a supercharger that kicked in at 20,000 feet and gave you a
boost like you wouldn’t believe. We were then able to operate at from
28,000-32,000 feet. It was just fabulous.”

Another addition: 250- and 500-pound bombs below
the wings of the squadron's Spitfires, which had been given a new job:
dive-bombing "Noball" (V-1 flying bomb) launch sites near the Channel
coast. Standard tactics involved entering a steep dive, then pulling out around
1,200 feet and dropping the bomb. "Now, by this time, you'd be traveling
at a pretty good clip and you'd just about have to have your feet on the dash
to pull it out,” said Barry, who added that "we lost quite a number of
pilots and we didn't know why. This was the reason: you'd black out when you
pulled out."

There was another challenge of this kind of work.
What happened if the bomb didn't release? The answer, the pilots were told, was
that a Spit could drop not only the bomb, but the rack carrying it, too.

One of Barry's colleagues had the chance to try
this out. The bomb failed to drop, and then so did the rack. Rather than land
with a live 500-lb. bomb aboard, he got back to Britain, pointed the aircraft
back toward the Channel, and then bailed out. "Well, the Spitfire spiralled
down and landed in a farmer's field -- and didn't explode!"

D-Day on June 6 brought plenty of patrols over the
invasion beaches and June 14 was the day on which the squadron touched down on
an advanced airfield ("a strip ploughed out of a farmer's field)") at
Beny-sur-Mer in Normandy. "The dust was so thick off this field that you
could spot it for miles and miles. It was like a mushroom cloud."

That first day brought an amusing incident. With
several buddies, Barry heard that a nearby French farmer was offering
"beer" to all comers. Much enthusiasm was mustered but, on closer
inspection, it turned out he had made "beurre" (butter) -- and not
"beer" (biere).

Even with the airfield so close to the front line,
he still logged 62 hours in June, doing patrols, strafing and bombing.

One op brought "the most intense flak he'd
ever seen”. Four of six Spitfires were damaged and Barry counted 17 holes in
his aircraft. "I was able to make a landing, but the old [engine]
temperature was just about off the clock."

Early in July, he retaliated by shooting up German
transport vehicles and tangling with 109s and 190s.

And then came July 7, 1944. "That was the big
day."

–––

Barry remembers July 7 well, and not only because
it was his father's birthday. It was also "the day I was shot down."

He was part of a section that had spotted and
strafed a large German transport truck and dispatch rider. Barry was pulling up
from an attack when "a big ball of fire about the size of a beach ball
came up between my legs!"

He pulled back the coupe top canopy, undid his belt
and stood up. "I popped out of there like a cork out of a champagne
bottle!"

He landed, turned and began running. A little
French boy pointed to some low bush. A hiding place! Barry dove into it and
crawled, but "I was only there for about two minutes when I had a rifle in
my ear and a German soldier saying, "Raus!"Raus!"

He was taken to a nearby French village, where a
German officer was holding, of all people, the young French boy. Barry told the
guards to let him go; he hadn't done anything. "What happened to him, I
have no idea. The only thing I can think of was that perhaps he'd tried to hide
my parachute. They had no reason to pick him up."

Barry had his own problems. He had been burned,
with loose skin hanging from his arms, face and legs, and his vision was
blurred. He got cursory treatment before being put into a building, where he
had to beg water from a guard, and eventually was taken to an well-camouflaged
airfield and turned over to the Luftwaffe –– which didn't seem to know what to
do with him.

He gave the standard name, rank and serial number
and found himself accused of shooting up ambulances. "I had to deny it --
but I knew other ones had done it, but the funny thing was that when they hit
them, they blew up -- which mean ammunition was being carried in them."

That passed, but Barry antagonized one of his
captors a little later when he complained about the food "Yikes! He just
blew up. I thought I was going to go up before a firing squad."

As he puts it, "confusion reigned" that
July of 1944 behind German lines in Normandy. He was taken to several different
places, dodging strafing Spitfires at one point and once riding with a group of
German soldiers coming back from leave, one of whom quizzed Barry on what a
Canadian was doing fighting in Europe. "He knew what he was doing: he was
fighting communism and he wanted to know what I was doing there." He
eventually ended up in the impromptu Stalag 221 at Rennes, in a three-story
high school. "The Germans posted guards and said to the French, 'Here, you
look after them!’"

The French rose to the occasion. There was a school
of nursing nearby and an 83-year-old doctor came out of retirement to help the
PoWs. Barry, still suffering from his burns, was chloroformed and operated
upon. "A couple of the guys who were in the operating room said it took
two guys to hold me own," That's 's how much I was fighting when they
pulled the skin off."

The food in the impromptu camp was horrible and
included large quantities of "stinky, stinky cheese". When a cart
lost a single loaf of bread arrived, "you'd never seen such a hungry group
of vultures."

"What we did most of the time was sit outside
in the sunshine," he recalled. He'd also watch the dead skin on his hand
until it was successfully cut away by a skilful French nurse -- who he was able
to find, and thank, 50 long years later.

All this ended around the 4th or 5th of August,
1944, when the troops of General George Patton arrived in the area -- at which
point mayhem erupted. The nearby SS headquarters was well and truly looted --
beds, desks, wine. One of Barry's pals, an American paratrooper PoW who'd
carried on a flirtation with a young nurse in a nearby apartment, disappeared
into her building "and might still be there!" Some of the guards came
back, but the senior British officer refused to accept them. Added Barry: "It
was the biggest party you ever saw. That square in front of that building was
just packed with drunken Frenchmen and PoWs."

Barry, however, was not among them. His throat was
badly swollen, so he put himself into the care of the elderly French doctor,
who successfully lanced his tonsils, generating a torrent of pus and blood, but
also a cure. Barry was handed over to a U.S. Army hospital unit, then bundled
onto a DC-3 and flown back to Britain. He was hardly recognizable as a
Canadian: he was wearing American paratrooper boots, plus a GI shirt and pants.
"The only thing I'd kept was my battledress [jacket], which was pretty
badly scorched.” Small wonder that when he reported to RCAF headquarters in
London, he was required to submit to an interrogation before he got a new
uniform and more leave, with which he and a friend "did London” for a week
or two".

As a former PoW, he could not go back on
operations, so he returned to Canada and was assigned to a ferry squadron at
Montreal, flying (among other things) Hurricanes into storage. He then was
posted to 170 (Ferry) Squadron in Winnipeg, helping move training aircraft out
of small airfields on the Prairies into storage centres.

At one point, he gave an impromptu airshow up and
down Regina’s Albert Street. At another, he was in The Queen City (where liquor
rationing was still in effect) when the idea of taking an Anson to Crosbie,
North Dakota, for booze was broached. $1,100 was collected.

Barry and Co. landed at Crosbie, where they were
met by the Border Patrol and made a chilling discovery: a fire had broken out
and was threatening the liquor store in Crosbie! That being the case, the owner
was more than eager to sell his inventory to his Canadian allies who, with the
Border Patrol's help, got the booty back to the Anson.

Their adventures weren't over yet.

Airborne, they noticed that a lit cigarette had
been dropped through the Anson's floor. Visions of an airborne fire danced
through their heads and there was nothing left in the fire extinguishers
"because we'd used them to cool the soft drinks!"

Pouring beer on the fire "would be a terrible
waste", so the airmen bravely took turns getting onto their knees and
urinating into the Anson's nether regions to extinguish the cigarette. "I
hate to think," said Barry, who would return to 412 Squadron one more time
(in the Air Force of Occupation in Germany before leaving the RCAF) "of
the next guys who had to fly that airplane."

And that night, the ingenious airmen had a party of
epic proportions. "We had more friends than you've ever seen."

Flight Lieutenant (Ret'd) Barry Needham was a young man when he flew four
sorties over the beaches of Normandy, France on D-Day during the Second
World War.

As a member of 412 Squadron, he flew with some of the most celebrated
wartime aviators in history, including Charley Fox (known for strafing the
staff car of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel from his Spitfire) and American John
Gillespie Magee, author of the celebrated poem, "High Flight".

Although F/L Needham has attended several squadron functions over the past
few years, it was the most recent event in his hometown of Wynyard, Sask.
that has the 90-year-old veteran more than a little choked up.

Wynyard recently named its unmanned airfield the W. B. Needham Field in a
ceremony that included tributes from the Commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Lieutenant-General André Deschamps, the commanding officer of 412 (T) Sqn, Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Philippouci, and Major Chris Strawson, chief multi-engine instructor at 3 Canadian Forces Flying Training School,
Portage-La-Prairie, Man. who has become quite close with F/L Needham in
recent years.

Maj Strawson and F/L Needham met during the 60th anniversary commemorationof D-Day in France in June 2004 and they flew together over Normandy during the celebrations.

F/L Needham had flown over Normandy during the D-Day landings in 1944, butwas shot down during the assault and taken prisoner in a makeshift German prisoner of war camp. Fortunately, after only 34 days, the American Army liberated the entire area and he was freed.

During his speech, Maj Strawson described F/L Needham as a man of
"integrity, fortitude, and resilience".

"Pilots like Barry provided hope. They sacrificed. They liberated Europe.
They freed small towns like Wynyard with airfields like the Barry Needham
Field," Maj Strawson said.

In a letter read aloud to the 150 guests, including a contingent of 17 Royal
Canadian Air Force personnel from 15 Wing Moose Jaw, Sask. and 3CFFTS,
Portage-La-Prairie, Man., LGen Deschamps thanked F/L Needham for "the
unwavering contributions that you have made over the years, and continue to
make, [which] were undoubtedly cemented during your valiant service flying
with the RCAF during the Second World War. Today, a new generation of RCAF
airmen and airwomen find inspiration not only in your wartime flying
achievements and sacrifices, but also in your exemplary service to your
community. May I also thank you on this occasion for your tremendous ongoing
dedication to the RCAF family. We will always consider you one of our own."

The airfield dedication included a flypast by four RCAF aircraft.

"It was truly an honour to witness such a joyous occasion, as all too often
such tributes are left until after our veterans have passed. It was a great
day indeed," said Alison Squires, publisher of the Wadena News, who covered
the event.

F/L Needham said it was "the greatest day of my entire life,
absolutely....To see two Harvard trainers, a helicopter, and a King Air all
come in for a landing at the airfield all on my behalf was just unreal."

After the war, F/L Needham returned to Canada and worked in the newspaper
business in Wynyard.

"Barry and my dad were great friends as publishers of their respective
weekly newspapers and as such, it was really an honour for me to be there,"
said Ms Squires. "Although the ceremony had its formalities, it was really
about the relationship between today's members of the Air Force and Barry
that stood out above all."